The one way educators still don’t use digital submissions to help themselves

Digital homework submissions are a beautiful, but underutilized tool for educators. While some aspects (such as TurnItIn) have been somewhat embraced, there’s one other big way that having essays and papers turned in digitally will make things easier for educators and make it harder for students to slack off and cheat. Word counts. Don’t give […]

First and Exclusive rights… and how robots.txt might impact those rights

One of the things that authors have to know about rights are how the terms “first” and “exclusive” relate to their works. At first blush, it seems simple. First publication rights means that a work has not appeared elsewhere before. Exclusive publication rights means that the work is not currently being published elsewhere. There are […]

Always try to sell short works before putting them in your own collection

I putz about on Reddit sometimes, and ran across this question in /r/Writing (relevant bit quoted below): [I’ve written some short stories now.] I was wondering whether I should submit somewhere online, or put like 5 shorts together and submit it as a book. I think this cannot be repeated enough times to new authors: […]

Publishers Will Fix Their Contracts If You Call Them On It

There’s an inherent benefit of calling people on their crap: not only might they fix their stuff, but it lets you see what’s wrong with your own. So I’m browsing /r/Writing on Reddit, and I see this post: If you can’t read it: Feel.news is the new place where you can submit your short story […]